On the second anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombings that killed three, maimed dozens, and injured hundreds, the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security shared in the memorial moment of silence in Washington, D.C.
Then they went to work reviewing: What has law enforcement learned from this tragedy and its aftermath about how to make sure another similar attack never happens.
"It's a day to look back and say some important changes were done, that America's safer, but we have a lot of work to do," said Rep. William Keating, a Massachusetts Democrat who serves on the panel and was a former district attorney for Norfolk County.
The committee has just completed a report called "Preventing Another Boston Marathon Bombing," and its says despite progress, big gaps in information-sharing between federal authorities and state and local police remain, along with failures in properly scrutinizing international travelers and monitoring travel records to identify, for example, Americans spending significant amounts of time in areas known to be jihadist terrorist enclaves.
"We're never in more danger, and haven't been, since 9/11 than today," Keating said in an interview with NBC News in Washington. "So we have challenges ahead of us, and if we can't honestly look at areas where there was mistakes made -- not to criticize anyone, but to learn from them and change -- then we're not set at all to meet the changing landscape of ISIS and Al Qaeda and the threats and sophistication that they bring to terrorism, right here at home, today."
Keating and the Republican committee chairman, Michael McCaul of Texas, both said they want to see the FBI share legally binding "memoranda of understanding" certifying that they will share information about terrorist threats with local police. Boston and Massachusetts authorities have said they never got adequate information about the alleged Marathon bombing ringleader, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, travelling in Chechnya, home to numerous radical jihadist terror cells.
With video editor Abbas T. Sadek
